WHERE I'VE BEEN (part three)

1. OK, this is going to require calling to mind events as long ago as mid-November and, since it’s already December, that indicates I’ve been elsewhere since most of this stuff happened. True. I went back to where I’m from for the T-day holidays, which began for me on the 26th with a ride on Amtrak. It was good to get away, especially when one considers that on Monday, the 25th, the center of downtown New Haven was in heavily armed and patrolled lockdown due to a call that claimed someone was heading to Yale campus to shoot it up. Nothing like martial patrols to send you packing. What did I do for almost a week after that? Not much, except eat more sweets—including apple pie and pumpkin pie—and more turkey than one man should ever consume, drink spiked egg nog, and watch football galore with me younger bros. Some good games I must say: Baltimore over Pittsburgh on T-day itself, Ohio State over Michigan on Saturday—down to the wire! (to say nothing of Auburn running back that field goal against Alabama!)—and both the Eagles (my bro’s team) and the Giants (my team) victorious on Sunday. If you’ve watched either team lately, you know what a frustrating task it is to root either on to victory, much less both. In between—the Broncos over the Chiefs! Somewhere along the way—day before T-day—was a trip to a local cinema to see Thor 2. More on that later, maybe. 

I wish I could say I read stuff, but not really, except a bit more Bleeding Edge on the train and lots of book reviews. Which provoked a certain annoyance at how the book reviews to which I subscribe pretty much review the same books, but that fact led to me reading two reviews of Malcolm Gladwell’s David and Goliath that showed me why I like Bookforum so much. Jim Newell’s take on Gladwell was something of a take-down. Meanwhile, at New York Review of Books, Freeman Dyson (!) didn’t so much review the book as divulge its contents—tepid book reviewing indeed. I also—on Black Friday no less—visited Main Street in Newark which meant shopping at Captain Blue Hen’s where (nostalgia must be sinking in its hooks) I picked up an omnibus of the first 30 issues of The Avengers from Marvel Comics. This covers the transition from drawings by Jack Kirby to drawings by Don Heck as well as taking me back to the era in which I was first learning to read—five, six, seven—and the images of Marvel Comics had a way of impressing themselves on my cranium that was second to nothing at the time. That same day featured a visit to Rainbow Records and new vinyl purchases: the dBs return album (for a different era’s nostalgia) Falling Off the Sky (2012) and the first Ramones LP to set to rights, sorta, the fact that I never owned any of their stuff, and PIL’s album—because, well, y’know. 

2. Before any of that happened, I saw some plays that I reviewed: Almost, Maine, the latest production by The New Haven Theater Company, and two shows at Yale Cabaret: Crave and Derivatives—the last an interesting take on New Haven itself c. “the Great Recession.”  I also saw a trio of plays I didn’t review because they are the work of 2nd year playwrights and 2nd year directors in the Yale School of Drama—or, as my friend Lee nicknamed it, due to the number of couples that have been emerging from it of late, the Yale School of Dating. 

3. On Saturday, 11/9, it was Phillip Howze’s Tiny Boyfriend, directed by Sarah Holdren, which featured great work from Mitchell Winter, who has really come into his own with his performances in the Yale Summer Cabaret, together with Yahya Abdul-Mateen II, who has been much in demand this semester, and very memorable work from James Cusati-Moyer as, first, a flippant and flamboyant boss and, then, a girl-child being raised by two dads;  Howze’s play is ambitious and a bit all over the place, stopping off at such timely items as online hookups, office romance, cock-comparing, penis envy, potty training, the Electra complex, and the vagaries of same-sex parenthood, along with knowing winks at racial profiling, stereotyping, and sexualizing. It was vastly entertaining.

4. On Saturday, 11/16, I saw Ryan Campbell’s Dead Ends, directed by Jessica Holt, the second play to have no female roles; Matthew Raich and Dan Reese were incredibly eloquent in alternating monologues rife with the rhythms of real speech and full of incidents—a flood in the home of a man who has lost his job, so that he has to take his wife and daughter to his not very welcoming in-laws; a humiliating day on the job as a Burger King assistant manager for a guy who shares a house with his much more successful brothers—that escalate toward one of those balls-out showdowns that Sam Shepard is famous for; the starkness of this production really stayed with me, even if there were a few things a bit overboard.

5. Then, on Friday, 11/22, I took in Emily Zemba’s I’m Sorry I Brought Up God, directed by Andrej Visky, in which there were two female characters—Gwen, played by Ashton Heyl, and Denise, played by Carly Zien—to one male, David, played by Ato Blankson-Wood. What started out as an awkward date situation became—with the re-entry of Gwen’s former roommate, Denise—an awkward threesome of intimidation and failed communications. The dialogue was full of repetition that meant every conversation was more or less stymied by its own pacing, but to what end? My general feeling was that it was anti hetero-coupling if not entirely comfortable with any alternatives—Gwen and Denise seem more likely to be lovers, though not quite, than either of the male-female possibilities, but at the center of it all was Gwen, a very brittle character played by Heyl as though, no matter what is happening, her mind is somewhere else. It seems a role that asks what is a woman if she doesn’t play the role of “woman”—but it was hard to tell what she might really be concerned with.

6. On Tuesday, 11/12, my favorite poet of our time, John Ashbery, read at the Beinecke.  At 86, Ashbery is getting on, certainly, and was in a wheelchair throughout the reading—he told us not to be too concerned, as he can walk some—but his very labile voice was still comfortingly in evidence. And his grasp of the locutions of our times as amusing and trenchant as ever. Does he still have a lot to say?  Well, not quite as much as he used to, but he still knows how to respond to the everyday patterns of speech in such a way as to render them prescient and nostalgic at once. He read a poem “about” the Ritz Brothers, a more dissolute version of the Marx Brothers that he knew of from his childhood. I had a brief chance to speak with him during the reception as he sat signing books (why the hell didn’t I bring along Flow Chart—to get a signature and any comment he might make about it?) and he seemed quite willing to chat about the movies he didn’t get to see as a kid and attributed his grasp of the idioms of our day to people like his young assistant. Listening to the reading, I found myself contemplating a command of American speech mannerisms that bridges the time of my parents’ childhood to the present day. No other poet makes me feel the existence of time as a part of our very figures of speech. The idea of poetry as “timeless” is both achieved and undercut in his poems and in ways that delight and surprise. 

7. On Friday, 11/15, I took another trip into New York, this time to see a recent documentary by Joe Angio—at the School of Visual Arts--on the Mekons, my favorite band of the 1987-1991 period (yes, I like them even more than I like The Pixies or the bands that were already past their brilliant early bloom at that time—Talking Heads, R.E.M.). The Mekons, who continue to make albums and have had a series of very good releases since 2000, kept up where The Clash left off. Indeed, one of the “lessons” of the film, The Revenge of the Mekons, was that bands who made it—like The Clash, like The Replacements—oftentimes came apart, unable to find, in the world of bloated concerts and over-played tracks, the conviction that united the band when they were broke and unknown. It’s not that the Mekons are “unknown” exactly, but certainly more obscure, perhaps more resolutely Brit (sort of like a latter-day Kinks in that regard) and, as the film made clear, the band began as a lark on the part of art students during the first flush of punk. The fact that they couldn’t play need not dissuade anyone, in those days.

But to keep at it required an influx of inspiration from elsewhere, which came in the form of bluegrass honkytonk, Chicago-style. The band actually learned a thing or two and from The Edge of the World (1986) to Honkytonkin’ (1987) to So Good It Hurts (1988) to The Mekons Rock’n’Roll (1989) they followed a track of ever-improving work. So much so that their chance at greater things came with the latter LP and a contract with A&M Records. Their next LP should’ve been “the one” that made their name. But forces conspired against them, the label dropped them (because the visionaries that signed them got sacked) and their great album The Curse of the Mekons (1991) was only available as an import from some no-name label. Sure, the great Indy Turn was about to begin, but, even so, the Mekons had been at it for over a decade at that point and it must’ve been rather discouraging to see the ship come in and then sail off without them. So it goes. 

The point of it all—and there’s a lot of high spirits in the film, particularly with bits like Jon Langford reminiscing about the night U2 opened for the Mekons!—is that the music of the Mekons is survivors’ music. It’s not the Hit Parade of any era. It’s raunchy, raw, inspired and inspiring. It’s the music that, as Jonathan Franzen (yeah, I know, it almost made me like him) says in the film, belongs to people of an “embattled critical stance,” who are vindicated by the fact that things don’t go their way—the Mekons' music makes misery more bearable. The misery of missed chances, perhaps, but more like the misery that comes with knowing that we’re on a fool’s parade, collectively, and there’s no hope for it. It was great seeing the film with Kajsa because she’s the person I passed their music onto most effectively. She gets it, in other words. And she was along the one time I saw them perform live, in 2000, in DC. The fact that some of the Mekons were present at the screening—Langford, Sally Timms, Steve Goulding—added to the mirth. More than any other punk-rock-rockabilly-altcountry band the Mekons have the feel of old English folk music and songs that face life’s grim realities with a gleam in the eye. 

8. Around 1994, when even the Mekons were starting to lose their edge, and R.E.M. was sort of on a comeback, I first became aware of the band Kajsa and I went to see on Wednesday, 11/20, at Terminal 5 in NYC. Mazzy Star suited us then—newly landed in Connecticut after Princeton—she none too happy with middle school and me none too happy with the job market after grad school. But it wasn’t until 1996 and Among My Swan that we were fully captivated. Though the previous LP, So Tonight That I May See, is the one that got people’s attention and put them on the playlist in the wide world of indie music, the third LP was more diverse, more sophisticated in its guitar arrangements, less overtly a Velvet Underground knock-off. Swan was just the right music for depressed dad and his moody daughter and we took it to heart. So there was no way we’d miss them on their comeback tour—to support Seasons of Your Day, their first LP in 17 years (!). 

Where did the time go? You’d never know more than a few years had passed, listening to their trademark low-key arrangements and lambent vocals. It’s not laid-back or mellow music, it’s the other side of that—it’s music for when you’ve been up for so long you’re pratically in slow motion.  Hangover music. Music for the darkest watches of the night when everyone just wants to ride on some inner path and not interact. Their concert was all in subdued lighting—mostly blue and violet spots. Hope Sandoval only visible because she wore a shiny tunic and a large belt; Dave Roback just a shadowy shape. The rest of the band—four others—never clear enough to say you could see a face. Behind them were retro projections, images that looked like pages from a book of ghosts. They opened with “Look on Down from the Bridge”—the final, bittersweet track from Among My Swan, a song that, when I first heard it, seemed an elegy for my daughter’s childhood. 

9. But don’t think it was all a downer. Earlier that day, Kajsa and I had lunch at the Whitney Museum, saw the Robert Indiana show, which is an impressive array of colorful and bold canvases conveying the American sensibility as icons, the kind of symbols that might appear on logos, currency, trucks and buses. We also saw as much as we could take in of Rituals of Rented Island, a show that brings together artifacts and films from the late seventies and early eighties in SoHo and environs, when things were very Mekony all over. It was like being in a time capsule, taking me back to a time of youthful acceptance of all that is the case. At the time, I would’ve been still in the belief that art meant a major painter—and that’s precisely what the artists in this show are avoiding. It’s the kind of art made by artists who make their living in day-jobs that entail the use of audio video equipment and cheap printing—and those are the means to the mediums they work with, not exactly conquering them, but who cares?  There’s something fresh and lo-fi about the whole show—check out things like the room of John Zorn’s Theatre of Musical Objects, or the props and stills from Jack Smith’s marathon adaptation—with stuffed puppets—of Ibsen’s Ghosts, or Mike Kelly’s absurdist TV skits, including Baby Ikki crawling into traffic and back on a NY street. I need to go back to the exhibit to see more.

Our day also featured a great meal at Hanci, a Turkish restaurant near the concert venue, picked out by Jason and made all the warmer and more cordial by the fact that Christmas seemed to be in the air: Kajsa and I saw the “Holidays on Ice” displays at Bergdof-Goodman en route from Whitney to Hanci, and I was stunned to see none other than Malcolm McDowell surge across my path, mere inches in front of me. It was the sort of the day that made me feel a Lucky Man indeed. 

10. On the Friday of the Mekons movie, I had some time to kill and picked up a couple books from the Strand tables at the bottom of Central Park.  One was Ira Levin’s Rosemary’s Baby, published in 1967 and made into a movie, directed by Roman Polanski, in 1968. I read it in the train on the way home that day and finished it off on Sunday, 11/17. I don’t know why reading the book attracted me so much except that it was a nice British paper edition and the prose is so easy to consume and so settled in its time.  It’s interesting to see how non-WASP people are handled in the book—including Italians and Negroes—particularly as the book is almost a parody of Catholic fears at the time.  Rosemary, while drugged and about to be raped by Satan, dreams of John and Jackie Kennedy and the Pope!  It’s that kind of world. The film follows the book so well, it’s easy to read it with images from the film playing in one’s mind’s eye. Though when I watched the film later that week it made me realize that the sardonic tone comes from the film-makers more than the source.  Levin intends the book to be a chiller and, in its steady focalization through Rosemary, it is. There’s a grasp of how hysteria feels that, I suspect, is what made the book popular with female readers—that and the fact that motherhood takes precedence. The message: abortion is wrong and a mother will love her child—even if the father is Lucifer himself.

11. On Sunday, 11/17, I learned that Doris Lessing had died. I didn’t compose a commemorative post for her because I don’t feel at all familiar enough with her work, though I have read three of her novels.  One of them I re-read that day: The Fifth Child (1988). The book followed Levin’s novel in an interesting way as it’s about a couple who is happily reproducing—though not exactly solvent—until they produce their fifth child. A painful pregnancy results in a child no one can love—he’s oddly grotesque without Lessing going into detail about it. It’s not so much his appearance as the effect he has on others. He seems not to be human, and yet he is. The boy, Ben, tests the sympathies of his family and of any caregivers he comes in contact with. His only joy is in hanging out with a motorcycle-riding older boy who takes him under his wing for a time (hired by Ben’s parents to do so, to keep him away from the family). Lessing seems to be sporting with different possibilities—is Ben a figure for the juvenile delinquent or is he rather proof that even JDs can do a good turn?  Is Ben a figure for the darkest fears about the unwanted pregnancy, the child society disclaims, the total misfit that can find no acceptance? Ben’s own mother, Harriet, sees him as freakish and somewhat terrifying, but the bureaucratic types that run child services act as if he’s simply a somewhat dysfunctional child, thus putting Harriet under the shadow of “bad mother.”  The book doesn’t resolve well, pulling back from the Gothic aspects it flirts with while not developed enough to be a statement about parenting or the socialization of children. And yet something about the book stays with you: a fear of the outcast and of being the outcast are strong enough in most of us to see how tenuous are our bonds with those who accept us, and how easy it is, perhaps, to see monsters in others.

It was an interesting “double feature,” in a way, entirely fortuitous. Something about mothers, I guess.

WHERE I'VE BEEN (part two)

8.  The main reason I went into NYC was not to see a vampire movie—it was either that or Žižek—but to stay over and visit the Met with Kajsa, on Sunday, 11/3, to see the Balthus exhibit.  The exhibit struck me as something of an exercise in kitsch.  Not because Balthus’ paintings are kitsch, though some are, but because the Met was doing its level best to both trade on the so-called illicit eroticism of these paintings of underage (for the most part) girls while also striking a high-minded pose that strove to avoid an objectification we might find offensive.  The very title of the exhibit, Girls and Cats—Paintings and Provocations lets us in right away on the come-on quality of the show.  Everyone loves images of putty-cats, apparently, and if you throw in some pre-nubile flesh then we get to be prurient while also not.  It’s art, y'know.  I state this as the “advertised” aspect of the show.  It’s not, in other words, simply a retrospective of Balthus, it’s a show that tries to put his penchant for depicting felines and young females into some kind of “dialogue.”  Meanwhile the wall commentaries apprize us of the name of every young model as if trying to make us see them as real little girls, often including some statement a model made once she was all grown up, as if to say: “see, they weren’t really damaged by having to sit motionless with their underpants showing or their bottoms raised up while reading on the floor.”  Such anti-objectifying is a bit peculiar, inasmuch as there seems to be little attention to what the paintings “say.”  No one, apparently, wants to see little girls simply as images, to allow what qualities of the pre-pubescent female form make it eminently depictable, but at least the show’s curator has arranged the paintings in groups that let us read a progress: the first room is a lyrical treatment, from the girl’s perspective, of the awkward and lithe appeal of her own body, while the second room takes us to something much more corrosive, where vanity about appearance and the flush of hormonal fluctuations make something else of teen-aged girls—children become baby machines.  This in itself is perfectly natural, we know, and yet everything in our culture—and in the stultifying interiors these young girls inhabit—tells us to suppress it.  These are bodies “underage” only because they are kept within the precincts of childhood, by a law of the Father and a complicity of the Mother that must have it that way.  In the third room Balthus is trying on different aspects of sensuality but not doing nearly as well—his skill is fitful—but the final room brings us to his very mannered matching of figure to interior that create images that are almost classical—if not, they are at least monumental.  Seeing so many of his canvases at once though makes one more critical of the painter than one might be seeing one or two in a collection.  Very much my father’s grand-daughter, Kajsa pointed out the painter’s problem with feet/shoes, and it’s really a bit bothersome how such deliberately rendered figures and settings can sport terribly gauche moments of bad draftsmanship.  Looking at these paintings made in the heyday of Picasso and Surrealism and Matisse, we see how the effort to maintain a certain realist fidelity often surrenders any strong painterly interest.  There are some lessons here for the Surrealists, but only fleetingly. I don’t have much to say about the putty-cats.  In the third room, Balthus loses his ability to make them sweetly sensual and was more clearly “King of the Cats” when he was younger. 

9. Speaking of young girls: my read on the train on Sunday, 11/3, was Charles Portis’ True Grit, which I finished when I got home.  The voice of Matty, the grown woman who narrates her adolescent adventure, in the company of Marshall Rooster Cogburn and Texas Ranger LeBoeuf, to find and bring to justice the man who killed her father, keeps before us the singular presence of mind that children can have.  There were two elements of the story in the novel that differed a bit from the film version by the Coens.  One was that the written Matty made me feel her affection for LeBoeuf better than the film does, though that may be simply because I like laughing at the figure Matt Damon cuts in the role.  Matty pokes fun at him in the book as well, but the grudging care and admiration they feel for each other—present in the movie but hard to render without Matty’s choice of words available in every instance—comes out stronger in writing.  The best aspect of the book that the film doesn’t do much with is the degree to which the West Portis presents us with is a territory united with the other states primarily through mutual ridicule and distrust.  Matty is clear about political forces that are altering the world she lives in and she’s clear about the distinct differences between, say, Texas and Arkansas in amusing commentary.  Portis gives us a very American voice in its appraisals of her fellow citizens.  The best thing that both book and film do is make Matty admirable as not simply some kind of “plucky” heroine but as a force of moral reckoning. She intends to be the Avenging Law and has no interest in anything else.  And yet Portis has sport with her because her achievement costs her more than anyone—save the dead of course—and the story, in dragging on beyond its climax, hints that we are finally in a woman’s tall tale of her youthful exploits.  The film surprises us with that sadder view—in showing us a grown Matty—because it made young Matty such a vivid and charming figure. 

10. Wednesday, 11/6, was another trip into NYC, this time to see a matinee on Broadway.  My company on Metro North this time was Thomas Pynchon’s new novel The Bleeding Edge.  It seemed the perfect companion for such a ride, and on a bright, fresh day.  I even read a bit of it in Bryant Park, sitting outside, after I arrived.  Reading on the train, I was chuckling, smiling.  I’m a fan and he knows how to work me.  It has a keen sense of how surface-rich our world is now, without a lot of depth to it, which inspires a lot of jokes.  In fact, TP seems more or less amused these days and aims to be entertaining.  The part that impressed me most, so far, is the description of DeepArcher, the untrollable layers of the internet, that are described in the terms that visionaries used to use for the internet, which has yet to become the virtual reality some could imagine when its technology first became familiar: “the echoing dense commotion of the terminal, the profusion of hexadecimal color shades, the choreography of thousands of extras, each differently drawn and detailed, each intent on a separate mission or sometimes only hanging out, the nonrobotic voices with so much attention to regional origins.”  Yup, you’ll never find online what you can find in a book. 

11. My trip on Wednesday, 11/6, was to see Mike Nichol’s production of Harold Pinter’s Betrayal, starring the husband-wife team of Daniel Craig and Rachel Weisz, playing Robert and Emma, a husband and wife in late-seventies Britain; he’s in publishing and his best friend is an editor, Jerry, who, in 1968, began an affair with Emma that lasted till 1975.  We meet them in 1977 and then journey backwards to the party at the home of Robert and Emma—in their bedroom, actually—where Jerry first makes advances on his hostess.  What has always drawn me to this play, since first seeing it as a film with Ben Kingsley and Jeremy Irons as Robert and Jerry, is the march through time, backwards, and the sense of what having a woman “in common” does for a relationship between friends.

We open with Emma telling Jerry that she and Robert are finally splitting up, that she found out he has been unfaithful to her with various other women.  This comes as a shock to Jerry because he never suspected, even while carrying on an affair for seven or eight years with Robert’s wife.  The fact is, which Jerry also does not suspect, Robert has known about Jerry and Emma since 1973, which Robert tells Jerry in the play’s second scene when Jerry, quite anxiously, runs to Robert to try to salvage their friendship after what he thinks is Emma’s revelation of the affair the evening before.  What those first two scenes establish then is that the marriage of Robert and Emma withstood Emma’s infidelity with Jerry and that Robert still very much values Jerry’s friendship.  What Rachel Weisz brought to the role is a real feeling of loss at the opening, a testing of whether “she and Jerry” meant anything when measured against Robert and Jerry, or her and Robert.  Emma has now lost Robert for good, and she lost Jerry when, in 1975, they broke up the flat that was the scene of their erotic rendezvous but had fallen into sad disuse.  The sorrow in Weisz in that scene is also revealing.  We may not know what she hopes to accomplish—keeping both men in her life happy?—but we see that it costs her to lose whatever hope there was in the affair.  She’s the odd man out in the friendship. Perhaps sleeping with both brought her closer to each man but, if it was her intention to maintain a relationship with either indefinitely, she has failed.  In that first scene, it is let drop that she’s “seeing” a writer named Casey and that there has been gossip about this.  Jerry proudly proclaims that no one gossiped about he and Emma during their affair.  But the upshot is that, perhaps, Emma has found a new paramour.  And yet, as portrayed by Weisz, she doesn’t seem a woman bent upon serial affairs.  She may be in demand (she certainly should be) but we can only guess what is really driving the affairs and the continuation of the marriage—in that decade from ’68 to ’77.  Admittedly, a very particular era, one in which divorce became quite common to say nothing of other ways to work marriage to get around the old “one man and one woman forsaking all others” model.  But the play isn’t called “Affair” or “Marriage,” it’s called Betrayal.

Craig plays the betrayed husband well in those scenes in 1973.  He doesn’t like the way he learned of it; he doesn’t like the doubt about who his son’s father is; he doesn’t like that Jerry doesn’t have the depth to sense what’s wrong on their lunch date.  But does he disapprove of Emma’s choice?  He likes Jerry, genuinely.  He admits at one point that he likes Jerry more than he likes her, so . . .   We might think Pinter’s playing around with the homoeroticism between two close friends, suggesting that, if it were permissible (in their view), they’d become lovers themselves.  Nichols even puts that before us (for a laugh, admittedly) when he has all three on a bed together in 1968 and Jerry seems to want to cozy up to Robert.  But let’s not be hasty. That version of things is rather unsubtle, actually.  If all it were is a case of repressed homosexual attraction, we might tell the two to get on with it.  Then “betrayal” would be the two “betraying” their real feelings.  But it’s not that.  Really, Robert just wants to play squash with Jerry. The point being that these are hetero men and hetero men have their own codes about how close they can get, and what they can get out of that.  One way they can get closer, maybe, is by having the same woman.  This is suggested when, after Jerry visits in 1974, Robert gets amorous with Emma.  He’s turned on by knowing something Jerry doesn’t, who thinks he knows something Robert doesn’t. And he’s turned on that Jerry leaves and he has Emma because, after all, he’s married to her.  If this sort of thing doesn’t interest you, then, I’m afraid, there’s little else here to beguile you.  Along the way, the trio talk books a bit—a factor that, at one time, I would’ve simply felt included by. Now, it seems almost quaint.  Remember when books were a major medium and novels, well, still important?  Possibly you don’t, but Pinter does.

Do we feel bad for anyone here? Emma, in this staging because, finally, she’s out of her depth.  She’s not a man and can’t quite understand them the way they understand each other.  She can love them or not (it’s up to her) but she can’t get closer to how they see things.  She can’t matter to them more than the other things that matter to them.  Today we like to be ultra-aware of sexism, as though it’s a factor of social relations that could be subtracted, thus making things “as they should be.”  Which translates, at some point, to: “without sexual difference.”  Betrayal knows all about the sexual differences of its time; it hails from a time when it was still a man’s world (even book-publishing!) if “with a difference.”  As an old hand of the Seventies myself (do I have to say “product of”?), I find myself amused by seeing it played before me, at this remove.

It’s an interesting lesson about staging plays, after all.  If I read a novel from 1977, I may react as I am now but I don’t have to decide how to present it.  In putting on, in 2013, a seventies artifact, one must decide whether to make it more feminist and LGBT-friendly, or to let it be what it really is, for the sake of something that many would not find sympathy with.  Much hinges on how Jerry is presented.  In Rafe Spalls’ performance, he’s very typical of his type: self-absorbed, likeable, edgy at times; Spalls has a tendency to over-emote that comes to be characteristic of Jerry, as though he’s trying to convince himself that he is feeling things, that he has reasons to be swept up in Emma, that he has reasons to remember throwing the young daughter of Robert and Emma up into the air, that he has reasons to feel “betrayed” when Emma tells Robert.  Does he feel betrayed when Robert tells him he already knew?  Yes, of course, but that means he never knew what Robert knew, which means, finally, that it was Robert’s game from ’73 on.  Robert’s “I hope she took care of you alright” is just what it is: a genuine hope that the woman in it was worth the candle.  Is either man?  Well, both seem to light Emma’s fire when in the mood; neither, it seems, is all that steady in the position, over the years.

The proceedings benefit from stage over screen if only because the scene-shifting creates a definite pace that must be adhered to.  Each vignette has its own point, its own value in the reckoning.  Triangulated desire, we might say, is what we start with, and what we end with is two mates who have come through “all that,” still able to talk books and have a pint or lunch or, yes, play squash. 

12. After the show (Craig and Spalls came out to sign playbills; Weisz didn’t), on Wednesday, 11/6, there was time for me to pop up to MoMA to take in the Magritte show.  It’s a show easy to see quickly (was I there a ½ hour, 45 minutes?) because Magritte’s paintings are almost like one-liners.  You take in the image, you reflect on its suggestion—about illusion or psychological distortion or about logical fallacies, or metaphors literalized—and move on.  Magritte is a painter who, like Balthus, is good enough for rendering a certain “reality,” making his images quite legible, with everything “realistic” enough to be like a dream, where we know it’s not real but are struck by what’s happening nonetheless.  It’s a very good show, laid-out well, and includes some early pieces of his I’ve never seen before, that are interesting in being more concerned with pictorial planes than with imagery per se, and some paintings in private collections that one might otherwise not see, that, anyway, haven’t been reproduced ad infinitum.  Magritte is not a bad painter, he’s just not a very good one.  What he does is fine for commercial art, and so he seems now a progenitor of Pop Art (when artists ceased to be concerned with the quality of painting), but that loss of what made for fine painting was lost on most of the Surrealists too.  In the urge to express ideas, the unique value of oils as a medium was lost, and that lets Magritte make paintings that would be even more effective as photo-shopped images.  Still, he possessed a fertile imagination and there’s something to be said for taking a little detour on your day through someone’s grasp of dream logic and the power of the cryptic image. So what if his sensibility harkens from the time when the female body was still an image for “mystery.” 

13. Friday, 11/8, was a visit to the Shubert in New Haven to see and hear a solo performance by the man who penned the words, “but when she’s lying stretched out on the floor / It’s no mystery to me any more.”  Elvis Costello appeared on stage behind a phalanx of pedals and before a phalanx of guitars, and proceeded to play for over two hours, accompanied by himself only.  There were a few songs on a keyboard as well, notably a stunning delivery of “Shipbuilding.”  He opened the show with “Home is Anywhere You Hang Your Head,” a song buried back there on Blood and Chocolate, but which had great punch as an opener: “here comes Mr. Misery…”  It’s not that Costello is miserable, exactly, but that he is able to make great melodies match lyrics that have their share of misery, so that the witty engagement between sentiment and musical setting does much to sell the song.  He took requests, which led to a striking “The Other End of the Telescope,” a song which took me back with some poignancy to when it was new—1996—and lots of riding about listening to music with my daughter on tapes that always had some share of Costello.  It’s a brilliant song.  And he also agreed to perform what he called “a song I hate”: “Everyday I Write the Book.” The popularity of the song (it had a great MTV video with Princess Di and Charles lookalikes, when Di was still very much alive, mind you) took him aback as it wasn’t “what I’m like.”  It’s a very clever lyric and he played it in a slower more soulful version, with the crowd echoing the “everyday”s to produce impromptu back-up vocals.  He also pulled out a few covers, notably “Walking My Baby Back Home” (which he dedicated to his wife), that included some lovely whistling, and was able to surprise me by doing “I Want You,” also from Blood and Chocolate and quite a thing of nasty beauty.  From my favorite LPs of his he didn’t do my favorite tracks, but “Human Hands” was good to hear, as was the conviction he gave to “I’ll Wear It Proudly” (alas, Get Happy! was not represented at all—had I been in earshot and not the balcony, I would’ve called for “Riot Act”), while “Little Triggers” had a lot of bite and, late in the show, a segue into “What’s So Funny ‘bout Peace, Love and Understanding” arrived as one of those “everybody knows this one” moments.  Another pleasant surprise was “Stranger in the House,” and my favorite track on Momofuku, “Flutter and Wow.”  Then there was "Girls Talk" (!) which took me back to 1980 when he had only four LPs and each was a gem, and then came a disk of the stuff that hadn't fit. In short, pretty much all of his career was represented and I’d say there was only one Costello original that I didn’t know.  Sometime I may have to say more about this guy and the long run he had, from 1977 to 1986, with significant sightings after that, to define what matters to me in the contemporary pop song.  And he’s a very affable entertainer as well, his voice—never exactly a pretty instrument—able to register inflections and nuances that make for fascinating listening.  Oh, and he did a new song that was quite good too.

WHERE I'VE BEEN (part one)

Want to know something that’s really tedious?  Indexing!  I’ve just completed indexing a 253 page ms. on the career of Bob Dylan.  Since that’s the last piece—after the time-consuming process of proof-reading page proofs and then scanning each of the 144 pages needing corrections—I can now say with some degree of satisfaction that this thing is happening.  The book will be out, in January I expect.  Until then, excuse me if I take a break from contemplating Bob Dylan.  No, that’s not true . . . I still want to post about Another Self Portrait, so, yeah, stay tuned.

The arrival of those pages needing proofing—I had from Oct. 24th to Nov. 11th to do this thing—coincided with some other notable events and some of that stuff is what I’d like to talk about.  Otherwise there’s the very real possibility that it will all become a blur, mixed up with the inevitable procrastination that starts to sap your energy when you’re trying to gear up for or avoid a task that pitilessly awaits.

1. Friday 10/25 featured a visit from the poet C.K. Williams to Richard Deming’s Working Group in Contemporary Poetry at the Whitney Humanities Center at Yale.  The main burden of the discussion was his book Writers Writing Dying and how he includes what might be called the “essayistic” (not Williams’ term) into poems.  The best thing about the poems in his most recent book is that they simply follow a train of thought, though of course with the attention to sound and form that make them poems rather than simply rhythmic writing. As one who believes that prose can sing and that poems should not be prosaic, I found the discussion worthwhile as touching on matters close to my sense of the possibilities of writing.  A poem like “Watching the Telly with Nietzsche” isn’t really profound as a reflection on Nietzsche or television, but it does get across the poet’s irritation with television filtered through Nietzschean ideas of “all is interpretation” and “there is no ding an sich.”  Two poems Williams read for us at the meeting stuck in my mind.  In one, the poet goes off on a contemplation of God, or, more particularly, his own ambivalence toward that concept as it has played out in his life, but the reflections are very concretely situated in a room where his grand-kids are asleep on the floor.  By the end of the poem, one of the boys wakes up and wants to know what his grand-dad is doing. The feeling that comes across is how real the boys are and how ephemeral is all of grand-dad’s inner turmoil over God’s existence or lack thereof.  It seems not to matter a jot against what really counts.  Williams also read a poem coming out in the New Yorker about advertising, essentially, that had a very comic sense of the absurdity of what we spend money on and how we let the lust for things dominate our thinking most of the time.  It’s rare that a poem makes me laugh but that one certainly did. 

2. Sunday, 10/27: on the very evening I learned of the death of Lou Reed, I—after posting some of the most apropos Reed songs I could think of to my facebook page—went to the Yale Ghost Tour hosted by certain shadowy members of the Yale School of Drama.  We met at the gates of the Grove Street Cemetery where, engraved in stone, the words “The Dead Shall Be Raised” might give hope to those inclined to meet up yonder, but which tend to sound rather creepy in these zombie-obsessed times.  Anyway, it was a slightly chill evening and it was fun to walk about in the fallen leaves in a tour group led to places where, legend has it, hauntings and bizarre occurrences abound.  A bit like an Ivy League version of a haunted hayride, but with the added interest of moving through some truly labyrinthine hallways and winding stairs and visiting some paneled room with seat boxes where an impromptu witch trial took place (and wouldn’t you know the person I had chatted blithely to upon my arrival at the cemetery gates would be the accused!).  Tanya was let off the hook though sentenced to death because The Woman in White interceded and then enacted the part of Zul in the ending of Ghostbusters as we all stood on a rooftop.  I’d say this entertainment was the best evocation of the Halloween spirit I encountered this year—thanks to Kelly Kerwin, Jessica Holt, Emily Zemba, Tom Pecinka and their attendant sprites.

3. Monday, 10/28, I shuffled along to a poetry reading by Glyn Maxwell because I’ve always heard good things about him.  The poems were formally accomplished and he was an affable enough reader.  I can’t say much stayed with me except for two things: one was from an anecdote he told wherein Derek Walcott had read poems Maxwell submitted in his class and repeated the phrase “collapsed into sleep” from one of the poems.  Maxwell owned that it wasn’t such a great phrase, to which Walcott replied it was good and all the rest was crap.  The other thing was Maxwell reading from a prose work in which he teaches four writing students.  It’s not that the characterizations were ungenerous (he himself had been some version of each at some point, he admitted) but that it, like the Walcott anecdote, suggested to me that all teaching is largely a one-on-one affair and best left there.  There were a number of students at the reading and I suppose there were lessons in there for them, but it wasn’t a lecture about writing, it was amusing “bits” about students commenting on each other’s work.  A bit demoralizing, if you ask me.  Not that anyone did.

4. On Tuesday, 10/29, it was a visit to The Visit, the first YSD thesis show of the season, directed by Cole Lewis, which I had been looking forward to as it featured actors I haven’t seen since the Summer Cabaret ended in August.  The play is long and varied.  I reviewed it here.  What I don’t mention there is that the audience had to walk across the playing area, greeted by inhabitants of Güllen, to take their seats, which kind of put us in the play from then on, and that the play was very draining.  It would’ve been nice to go have a drink at Sullivan’s after, but, alas, Sully’s is no more, and nothing else in the area is serviceable.

5. On Halloween itself, Thursday, 10/31, my wife and I attended the opening night of Caryl Churchill’s Owners at the Yale Rep, which I reviewed here.  What I don’t mention there is that we attended wearing the face-masks I kept from Sleep No More, so from about a block before our arrival at the Rep’s portal till the lights went down we were masked.  I had hoped there might be others present in Halloween outfits of some type, but no.  The play, following last month’s Streetcar, shows the Rep is on a roll, so far.  The reception after was a bit subdued (I suspect many went off to Halloween events), but I stayed around to chat a bit with two recent YSD grads in the cast as well as some of the cast of The Visit.  And had two free glasses of wine. Larvatus prodeo, folks.

6. The next night, Friday 11/1, my daughter and her boyfriend came to town to attend two events: the Polish composer Krzysztof  Penderecki conducted the Philharmonia Orchestra of Yale in his Threnody to the Victims of Hiroshima (1960) and his 2nd Symphony (1980), with, sandwiched in between, Prokofiev’s Piano Concerto No. 2, conducted by Toshiyuki Shimada with soloist Henry Kramer.  It was a free concert and the Threnody alone was draw enough.  It’s famously known as the disconcerting music on the soundtrack of The Shining when, for instance, Wendy discovers what her husband has really been writing for weeks, and in person it’s a thrilling experience with string sounds that seem eerily alive and a tempo that feels like trying to run in a dream and not getting anywhere.  The 2nd Symphony is more lively but not as sublime—I greatly enjoyed the array of percussion instruments on the stage and there is an uplifting power at the end.  The piece by Prokofiev was actually my favorite part of the evening because the piano-playing was so expressive and that little phrase in the first movement was hauntingly familiar somehow.  During an intermission we looked out the windows of Woolsey Hall to see a large crowd in the Beinecke courtyard celebrating Divali, the Hindu festival of lights, with sparklers.  After the concerts we went, with my wife, to the first late night Cab show we’ve attended this year: the 11 p.m. show of Radio Hour which featured radio programs done in the style of the forties, and which I reviewed here.

7. The tape I made for Kajsa in honor of her visit was called Saturday Grooves, from a Robyn Hitchcock song, “Saturday Groovers,” that pretty much captures the mood of Saturday, 11/2, as we strolled in sunny streets arrayed with yellow and orange leaves into downtown New Haven.  I took a number of photos along the way and we had sandwiches outdoors at the ever popular Book Trader.  In the evening, we rode Metro North into New York and, after stashing Jason’s suitcase in his office at Cooper Union, we went to see Werner Herzog’s remake of Nosferatu at the Film Forum, starring Isabelle Adjani at her most diaphanous and Klaus Kinski at his freakiest.  I’d like to say I stayed awake through it all, but I didn’t.  I blame the late  night (we sat up talking till near 4 a.m. Sat. morning) and those potent Manhattans I had at Madame X’s en route to the cinema. I recalled that the first time I saw Nosferatu Kajsa wasn’t yet born or was an infant . . . turns out it was the former.  It would’ve been the fall of 1979, early after the move to Philly. I remember being disappointed by it at the time though there are images from it that stay with me. In any case, I was very much into it this time but couldn’t quite hang on. But at least I can say that I was loyal to my tendency to doze through vampire movies.